A steady voice of Cowboys, Sham was muffled one time

By RAY BUCK

rbuck@star-telegram.com

Brad Sham knows all about “no pain, no gain.”

He spent one late-night Super Bowl eve in a dentist chair having a crown repaired.

Rendered speechless — and not in a good way, either — Sham made the kickoff on time for SB XXVII at Pasadena, Calif., without a trace of discomfort or angst.

And the Dallas Cowboys went on to win the first of their three ‘90s Super Bowls.

(Until now, Sham had completely forgotten the dental disaster ... or was he just trying to forget? It was hard to tell.)

The venerable “Voice of the Cowboys” is now entering his 30th season (third-longest tenure among play-by-play announcers with the same NFL team). That’s one year longer than either Landry or Schramm.

And like those two fabled franchise architects, Sham has been fired once by Jerry Jones.

“What I did was stupid of me,” Sham recalled.

He dragged Jones’ name into a spitting match between the Cowboys radio booth and then-coach Barry Switzer, on the air, in the next-to-last pre-season game of 1994.

“Jerry didn’t like it, and I don’t blame him,” Sham said.

The Cowboys, at the time, were the two-time defending Super Bowl champs. Jimmy Johnson had been replaced by Switzer.

Sham, then in his 19th season with the Cowboys, was immediately yanked as TV host of The Jerry Jones Show, although he continued to work the booth alongside Dale Hansen for the rest of the ’94 season.

Switzer wanted them both fired.

Sham saw this as an awkward situation (Switzer refused to be interviewed by Sham) which could be remedied by defecting to Arlington to broadcast Rangers games, which he did (’95-97).

Sham returned to the Cowboys only after Switzer was fired. In his second tour of duty (’98-present), Sham has never missed a beat.

Today, Jerry Jones says, “Brad has unique insight into the team. I trust his judgment.”

It started out Super

With the 1976 season already in progress, Sham began as a color analyst alongside Verne Lindquist on the Cowboys Radio Network.

Sham’s NFL initiation was short and not-so-sweet.

The ’76 Cowboys lost only three regular-season games but were ousted in the first round of the playoffs. Sound familiar?

The next year turned out much better.

“That ’77 team won the Super Bowl,” Sham reminded. “And what has always remained firmly ingrained in my mind is the bus ride to the Superdome for that [27-10 win over Denver].”

As a 28-year-old radio analyst of America’s Team, Sham was working his first full NFL season. He was green. Conditions were crude.

He used alligator clips to attach an audio mixer to his hotel phone line.

He conducted all on-air interviews back to his station from his hotel room, counting on the likes of Roger Staubach, Tony Dorsett and Randy White to drop by and chat.

“The team stayed at a New Orleans airport hotel, which was a total dump,” Sham said. “Today, of course, you have ‘radio row’ at the Super Bowl media center, but we were so far from that universe back then.

“Anyway, what I remember most about that Super Bowl is getting on the team bus, and thinking, ‘Why does this feel like every other bus ride to a game?’ I kept waiting for some existential moment to occur.

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